Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We use Auvik to monitor if our network equipment goes down.

We implemented Auvik to be proactive in case the internet connection or equipment goes down.

I occasionally use the network map to identify new devices connected to the network. It provides a real-time visualization of our infrastructure. Additionally, the map initially displays a collapsed view, requiring expansion for detailed information.

Auvik significantly reduces our Mean Time to Resolution, especially when devices malfunction. Now, I receive immediate alerts, eliminating the need to wait for phone calls or emails from someone reporting a downed access point or camera. This was especially helpful in a case with our D-Link access points at one of our sites. When these devices fail, they don't completely shut down; they keep rebooting, broadcasting the Wi-Fi network, and then disconnecting users. Before Auvik, this repetitive cycle could go unnoticed for days, leading to frustrated users and disruptions.

We see the benefits of Auvik fairly quickly. 

The quick alerts in the event the equipment goes up or down is the most valuable feature.

When port utilization rises beyond a set threshold, an alert will be sent to allow for proactive network planning and distribution adjustments. This could also help identify heavy data users.

The user interface is not intuitive. For example, when a device fails and I need to replace it with a new one, I'm required to delete the old device from the system to prevent recurring alerts about its downtime. While I was able to find instructions on how to do this in the knowledge base, the process itself is illogical. It necessitates navigating to the "Discovery" menu, which seems counterintuitive for deleting an existing device. A more intuitive approach would be to enable deleting a device directly from the list of all devices, eliminating the need to access a separate menu labeled "Discovery" for an already discovered item.

Some device placements appear inconsistent with their logical locations, like network switches. For example, I might see devices related to the same switch cluster scattered across different areas of the map. This inconsistency in positioning for co-located devices confuses me.

Setting up a new site or viewing device configurations, particularly those involving SNMP and similar protocols, often requires significant technical knowledge. I believe simplifying this process would be a major benefit, but I'm unsure if Auvik can do so.

I have been using Auvik for almost one year.

Auvik is stable.

Auvik is scalable.

One of my sites experienced an issue where the internal internet connection port on the firewall had been changed. Consequently, our Auvik agent wasn't capturing any traffic data, affecting our utilization reports. I contacted tech support to troubleshoot, but the email-based communication proved ineffective. While I appreciate their attempt to help, I would have preferred a phone call or a remote session for a quicker resolution. The back-and-forth emails with unclear instructions simply became time-consuming, and eventually, I had to prioritize other tasks. This made me realize that offering a remote session option early on in the support process would be incredibly beneficial for customers like myself. I am unsure if it's a language barrier or the location of the support team, but encountering this email-centric approach with several companies has led me to believe it's a preferred communication style for some tech support teams. However, for me, it's not the most efficient method. While I give their technical knowledge a high score of nine or ten, I feel their support delivery falls short at around three or four. Instead of sending me emails with links to lengthy documents, a 10-15 minute support call could have resolved the issue quickly. Ultimately, spending hours reading manuals and troubleshooting without success feels like a waste of valuable time. Therefore, I recommend exploring the implementation of a remote session option for enhanced customer service and increased efficiency.

Neutral

The initial deployment was straightforward because it was done by the Auvik techs.

Two Auvik techs implemented the solution for three of our sites.

The price is reasonable.

I would rate Auvik an eight out of ten.

No maintenance is required.

The biggest requirement to use Auvik from a technical perspective is having SNMP knowledge. The rest is straightforward.

We're using it just to monitor customer equipment and make backups for network device configuration changes. We're using maybe one percent of what it's capable of doing. We're trying to get some of our stuff straightened out since whoever set up our Auvik did not do a great job of organizing it.

I like the alerting. It integrates with our ticketing system. I like the fact that it integrates with our ticketing system so that we can open tickets and close tickets for network outages. 

I like that it can actually log in and make backups of multiple types of equipment. We have a lot of different customers out there with a lot of different equipment, and this one tool can actually log into anything. We haven't found one that it can't yet. It can log in to almost any piece of equipment and make backups for it, monitor changes, et cetera, if any network changes happen. We can also monitor network usage at different locations and check for overallocation.

It provides us with an intuitive interface that supports ease of use. Their website is very easy to use. This ease of use helps with troubleshooting network issues. We use the product a lot to troubleshoot. We don't use it as much as we'd like to. That's one of the aspects that we're working towards. It is capable of doing a lot more than how we're using it for currently.

They have a dashboard, and a topology map. I've used their topology map a few times. It actually shows you the connections between different devices. That has helped a lot in terms of finding how equipment is connected and finding loopholes in your network. This dashboard and network map give us a real-time picture of our entire network. I have found it to be very easy to work with.

It has helped us decrease our mean time to resolution, however, at this time, we don't really use it enough. I wish we were able to use it more. That said, I can see what the features are capable of doing. It's just that we haven't actually had that benefit yet.

The solution allows us to spend less time on setup and maintenance and less time on issue resolution.

The tutorial could be a little bit more comprehensive. Their online training is one area that needs improvement. 

I've been using the solution for six months. The company's been using it a bit longer. 

I've had zero experience with stability issues. 

The solution seems to be very scalable. 

Technical support seems to be very knowledgeable. They handle tickets in order once they come. They do everything fine. They've been able to resolve issues. Once, they just couldn't do something that we were asking them to do due to their policy. That said, it's fine.

Positive

I have used different solutions in the past. This is more network-oriented. If you know how to use either tool, you'll definitely realize the benefits right away. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Whenever we make a network change or whenever we add a device, it requires some maintenance.

I'm not aware of the exact pricing of the product. 

We're customers and end-users.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Its main use case is network monitoring, specifically for some of the essential elements of our network. It monitors more, but we're really after those essential elements.

We were able to track down a couple of misconfigurations that were minor but we had missed. We now have a much stronger, clearer understanding of network health at a quick glance, and we're quickly able to diagnose.

It provides a single integrated platform. That was one of the reasons that we ended up checking it out. I had too many network elements, and I couldn't monitor it all from one place.

It has affected our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks. 

Automatic alerting is probably the most valuable. Its network visualizations are fairly intuitive. It's pretty straightforward. 

The setup was not difficult. It was time-consuming. It took a little time to get it set up, but once it's all set up, it's pretty simple.

I'd probably like a little bit more mapping functionality. It gives me a visual overlay of the way that one network segment links to another, but I can't adjust it. Everything is at an equal distance, which makes sense, but I'd probably group some of the things closer and further as it reflects in reality, but I can't do that right now on their system.

We've been using it for about six months.

They're very good at alerting us to weekend maintenance. It seems to only be weekend maintenance, so I think highly of their stability.

We only have two sites, and neither of them is huge, but so far, the scalability seems just fine.

I've contacted their tech support. They were fantastic. I'd rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I did previously use a different solution. I had tried a similar competitor. I cannot remember the name of it, but I wasn't happy with it. Once my year expired, I decided to not keep it.

It was very straightforward. It was time-consuming but not complex.

We were able to use elements of it immediately out of the box. VLANs, some of the fine-tuning, and some of the more minutia definitely took some legwork, but immediately out of the box, some of the elements started popping up. It was pretty cool to see items popping up right away.

To fully deploy the solution, it took a couple of weeks, but that was not a couple of weeks of only focusing on that.

When comparing the time and cost it took to set up and maintain Auvik versus our previous solution, it was faster in terms of time, but the cost was higher. However, it was worth it.

We did it all by ourselves. It was just me. I probably spent two or three days of full-time work doing it.

It is deployed at multiple locations. In terms of maintenance, there is a collector that runs on our server. I don't know if I'd call it maintenance, but it is somewhat dependent on at least one piece of hardware staying up here on our campus.

We have seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution. 

I appreciated the way Auvik's pricing scaled with the size of my network. We're a non-profit, and they gave us a non-profit discount. I didn't do an exhaustive comparison, but I felt their pricing was pretty reasonable. I'm a cheap guy when it comes to spending in a non-profit, but I did feel that what I was getting out of them was a good value for my dollar.

I've tried prior applications. I had been trying to find one single method. We went for Auvik because of the good support and good sales. They did a good job at sales, showing me the system, and walking me through things. They were very responsive and good at follow-up. They took good care of me.

I'd advise being aware of all of your VLANs and making sure that the server you're going to run or the machine you're going to run the host on has proper access to all elements of the network. If you have separate segments, it's not going to catch those things. So, you may have to open up some pathways from various VLANs back to whatever server you're running this on.

We haven't done a ton of automation, but it looks like it could help to reduce repetitive low-priority tasks through automation. Similarly, we haven't utilized device inventory much from them. I suppose it would be network device inventory. It wouldn't be endpoint inventory.

In terms of comparing Auvik's cloud-based solution versus the other on-prem network monitoring solutions, I'd probably consider it to be a hybrid. That's because there is still monitoring software that has to run here, but the GUI is all in the cloud. It's similar, and it's nice, but it's not life-changing.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

We manage IT infrastructure for 400 companies, and Auvik allows us to monitor it remotely. We have a portal to monitor these companies' servers, devices, routers, and APs constantly so we know when something is down and needs to be repaired in real-time. It's nice. We have it implemented in our Autotask and service desk portal, so it can automatically open and close tickets.

Auvik has improved our company's operation tenfold. It allows us to do real-time network monitoring down to a printer connected to the network. 

We can also automate and streamline fixes for recurring issues. We can determine an ongoing problem and find a real-time fix for it. We monitor and log different events. Once we have enough cases, we create an automated fix for that issue and cross it off our list, so we don't have to worry about it again. It's been overwhelmingly successful in our company.

Previously, we had various managed portals and a list of URLs to check. We went to a client company to see what portals they used. It was an absolute nightmare. Credentials would change constantly, so we couldn't log in. It was horrible.

Auvik has saved us a lot of time. Much of the solution is automated and monitors by itself, letting us know when critical issues occur. We no longer need a dedicated technician to log into every network. It gives us real-time monitoring, so we don't need someone to check every network first thing in the morning to see if any issues require a response. 

When I click on one of the 400 companies we monitor,  Auvik will give me a spanned view of everything on their network, from their DMZ to their servers, switches, firewalls, printers, and PCs. It opens a tree view, so you can go down the list from top to bottom, which makes troubleshooting things much easier. We get a much broader view. In addition to monitoring endpoints for threats and performance, Auvik lets us see the topology of the entire network, which is perfect for our purposes.

The intuitiveness of the network visualization is amazing. Several times, it's picked things up that I've missed. I look back and ask, "Why is Auvik alerting me about this? I know that's not an issue." I'll dig deeper into it; they've noticed something I didn't even see, saving me time and energy.

Without Auvik, our technicians would spend countless hours troubleshooting things unnecessarily. When you get a call from a client with network issues, Auvik can pinpoint precisely where the problem lies. Otherwise, you'll blindly go through every device, trying to figure out what's happening, which could take hours. 

It has freed up a lot of time for our technicians to work on new projects or get certifications. We have 25 technicians, and Auvik has freed up around 24 to 48 hours of additional time for our technicians to do other tasks. Auvik has also enabled us to utilize junior staff better. The GUI interface is easy for a low-level tech to learn. After three or four days of training, they can understand how Auvik works and become accustomed to using it more often. 

I would not want to work at an MSP without a networking monitoring tool. It would be a step back to a point where you struggle to get one ticket done when you could have done eight because you don't have the necessary information. That's what Auvik does for you.

Without the updated real-time information Auvik's device inventories supply, we're not giving the customer the reliability and performance they request. These monitoring tools allow us to be proactive and see things before the customer realizes a problem. That's our reputation. That's what Auvik has given us. Any updated information will save us time. We can't use bad information when we try to fix the issue. 

I like the way everything can be integrated. Auvik uses SNMP and various protocols to ensure we can monitor any device on the network.

Auvik has issues with collecting information from some devices. I don't know if this is an issue on Auvik's end or if the device isn't compatible. We have noticed that some clients have been unable to add their devices to Auvik due to compatibility, but devices are fickle. I think it's a device issue and not an Auvik issue.

I've seen Auvik resolve these issues. They will create the ticket and tell us the issue is resolved. For example, maybe the customer restarted the modem, or the ISP got it running. They'll go ahead and close that ticket. The automation there is so nice that it will keep us updated if something's happening automatically.

I started using Auvik about a year ago. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for stability.

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10 for scalability 

I rate Auvik support nine out of 10. We've had to reach out to them a few times for custom things or issues with devices not connecting. They've always been very helpful.

Positive

We previously didn't have a managed or automated solution like Auvik. It was a list of URLs and an Excel spreadsheet for each company with all their networking and login information. After we got the pitch and went through the evaluation process, we realized what it could do for us as an IT company couldn't say "No."

Setting up Auvik can be tricky, but I think setting up any of these systems can be difficult initially. It's a piece of cake once you have the baseline down and your systems in there monitoring it. Our deployment was complex because we have 400 different companies, and each has various equipment with varying ages. 

I don't think using Auvik was complex per se. It was just the complexity we were trying to add to it. For a few small companies, we had to work with Auvik to set up custom APIs to get some things to work, but it went smoothly for the most part. 

After implementing the collectors, the network map started to populate within minutes. I think it's attributable to Auvik's ability to work the way it does and the protocols it enables to push this information over the network. We already have the credentials set up in the Auvik portal, so it has the permissions it needs. It can scrape that device for as much information as possible.

We've freed up a lot of extra employee time because of Auvik. It automated many tasks that required a dedicated technician to spend four hours each day checking every company's network. Auvik does that all the time, so it saves our employees a lot of energy and time.

It all depends on the scale of your implementation. It would be pricier for a smaller company ranging out for a few remote locations. It's cheaper if you're using lots of licensing. My advice is to try different solutions and see what works best for you. For us, that was Auvik. I think Auvik's current price is competitive and works for our business environment

We did look at a few other options, including Kaseya and SolarWinds. Auvik was the best option for pricing and features we were looking for in a product. 

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. If you plan to use old devices, verify that SNMP is an option. We had a lot of issues with a device that was 25 years old.

I am the network administrator for our company, and we use Aruba Central but we're looking into Auvik to see what else we can do with it. We're seeing quite a bit of difference.

We have been using multiple applications for managing our networks. Switching to Auvik has been amazing. It has been impressive. Without Auvik, I go through five different applications every morning, clicking through everything. It's very irritating. I have Auvik open in front of me right now and it's simple.

It definitely reduces repetitive tasks with its automation. One of the biggest things is the mapping records widget. With our current system, I have to do the mapping. If we replace an item or we change an IP address, I have to go back through everything and change what I've done. I go through the five applications in the morning to figure out my APs, my Cisco equipment, my Aruba equipment, my Blancco Management, et cetera. Auvik saves a lot of time and a lot of repetitive work.

I can go into it and get a configuration file. With some of our other solutions, because not all of our switches are Aruba, I then have to go to the switches to pull the configuration files. With Auvik I see all of them here. It doesn't matter what brand it is. It saves me a lot of time.

The automation Auvik provides has allowed us to see areas that we need to fix, which, of course, is very important. And it has reduced our MTTR because I see things more quickly and I see things through Auvik that I can't see through Aruba.

It would improve things a lot for us [if we continue beyond our trial of the solution]. It noticed a drop on my network at the instant it was happening and sent me a notification. We had a couple of devices that were questionable and Auvik said, "Hey, you have Raspberry Pis on your network." To me, that's very important. I don't like Raspberry Pis because they are easily hacked and I don't want them on my network. So far, what I've seen with Auvik in terms of notifications has been great.

Another benefit is that it keeps device inventories up to date. It notifies us about firmware updates and about what we need to change, which is nice and has saved us time. It tells us everything. I like it because if, for example, the device is a phone, it tells me the subnet that it's on and the IP address. It's great.

We are trying to get a full package together to go to our vice president and say, "Hey, this is what Auvik has done for us and we need to continue." Right now, we have five different software tools that we're trying to use and manage things, while Auvik is one. I'm fighting very hard to get Auvik.

One thing I like about it is how it maps the network. It shows all my devices and it shows everything that is possibly connected to the network. Most of our network is in the cloud and the mapping starts with basic internet, where it is. It gives me how many devices or switches are connected, and what is connected to each switch, including how many printers are on it. We have Blancco Management and our backup servers, and Auvik tells me how many of those are connected. It gives me everything. At this minute it shows me that 346 devices are connected to our network and what they are. That's beautiful, and I didn't have to do it. I have had to go and map out, by hand, every device on the network with what IP address it's set to. That's a pain.

And the visualization is very eye-catching. It's easy to use and very self-explanatory. If something is eye-catching it makes people go into it more. I really like that.

I also like how it even tells us that printers are low on paper.

To me, it's very simple to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. We were setting up the SNMP with Auvik yesterday and everything on it—setting up our firewalls with it—is very simple.

It also seems to be a single, integrated platform. We have 26 switches and hundreds of devices and it has detected everything. So far, we're very pleased with it. I take care of our network in Oklahoma City and in Memphis. Being able to see everything in one place is very important. With Aruba Central, I'm only able to see the switches in Oklahoma City, and I can't even see my APs because my APs are not Aruba. Aruba only lets you see Aruba. With Auvik, I'm able to see all the types of devices that I have, which is extremely important.

We have a lot of remote users. It's nice that we're able to see them and keep up with what's going on there. That visibility is extremely important. We have a very small IT team and we have to stay on top of things quickly. Ours is a larger company and, with a small IT team, things can get away from us very quickly. It's nice to have that full visibility and those upfront notifications so that things don't get away from us very quickly.

The window view could be improved. For instance, if I'm in inventory and I'm looking at my devices, I don't like the way the window splits at the bottom. I want to be able to choose the way it appears.

Similarly, when it shows me all the devices on my network, I don't like the fact that I can't adjust the display to the way I want it. I can increase it, but it's very difficult to move up and down to see that part of it.

We've been on the free trial of Auvik for 12 days.

I'm very impressed with the stability of Auvik. I have not had it go down or had a major issue. I haven't even had a small issue with it.

We spoke to some people from Auvik and their support is very friendly. They're very helpful and very knowledgeable. I was extremely pleased with them.

Positive

We currently use five other solutions.

The price that Auvik is offering us is a little bit steep. I'm hoping we can figure out something else about the pricing, but right now, it's a little bit steep.

My boss has been looking at five or six different solutions and he came across Auvik. He asked me to check it out. I brought it in and started using it and, so far, overall, I like Auvik the best.

When comparing network monitoring solutions and there is a concern about pricing, my approach is that you get what you pay for. The functionality is extremely important to me. The pricing is extremely important to my VP. You need to write out the pros and cons based on your needs and figure out how the pros and cons compare with your budget. But I would suggest you give Auvik a chance.

I like Auvik's cloud-based solution much better than having an on-prem network monitoring solution. We still have a couple of servers that are not cloud-based. I like the cloud much better.

If you are looking for any type of monitoring software, make sure that you find a product that sees every type of device on your network. Auvik even shows me the redundancy that I have on there. For a network administrator that's very important.

We're a managed services provider using Auvik to monitor our clients' infrastructure. It is part of a set of tools that keeps us informed when something goes wrong, and we use it to build network maps. You can get an idea of what's happening on-site even if you're unfamiliar with the client's setup.

Sometimes it's the only thing on the network. It's competing with Ubiquiti if we have a Ubiquiti network. Not all the time, but sometimes. 

Auvik allows us to react faster to issues, so we're able to keep our SLAs. 
Depending on the issue, we're reducing our troubleshooting time to within 20 to 30 minutes. Some of our clients have one-hour SLAs, so that's an important turnaround.

We have much better visibility into our clients' networks, which is helpful when we're troubleshooting. When issues go wrong, we're more present. It helps us automate some low-level tasks. For example, it closes tickets on its own. 

The fact that Auvik is a cloud-based solution is crucial because we're primarily a cloud-based company monitoring multiple clients across several sites. The cloud functionality is handy because we get visibility across distinct companies all from one location. 

Monitoring is probably the most active asset Auvik does for us. If a particular device on the network goes down, we have that granularity to see which network element is causing the problem. 

The integrations don't give us too much trouble. It all works with Auto Task reasonably nicely. Once it's set up, it'll close out in Auto Task too, which is great. The network visualization is excellent if you build it out and tweak it, so it reflects the truth. You'll get most of the picture if you let it automatically populate. Once it's built out, the network map is decent.

The network visualization is pretty intuitive. There's not too much going on with the network map there, and you understand what a network looks like. I think it's pretty straightforward.

Auvik doesn't communicate very well with Ubiquiti devices and will incorrectly flag facets as down. Compatibility with Ubiquiti is my biggest pain point with Auvik.

I have been using Auvik since I joined this company in July 2022.

I haven't had any issues with Auvik's stability.

Auvik seems fairly scalable. It works for all of our clients, ranging from 10 devices to a few hundred. It works well for small to medium-sized businesses. 

I give Auvik a solid seven out of 10. I might rate it eight if the Ubiquiti issue wasn't always bugging me. It tells me Ubiquiti devices are down when they're not. I recommend giving it a try. If you are trying to track multiple sites and multiple clients, it's worth a look.

We use Auvik to manage our network, infrastructure, and servers across various locations. We don't use the automation portion of Auvik except for automated integration with our ticketing system. Auvik sends alerts, but we haven't set it up to resolve issues automatically.

In the past, we had to use the web UI or an SSH prompt to access a network switch and make modifications, but now we find that we can do that through Auvik. It saved us a significant amount of time by bringing everything under one roof. It's a big time saver to go to the Auvik website and make those changes. It's hard to quantify, but I would say it reduces the time needed by around 80 percent. We can respond to alerts and resolve them more quickly. I estimate that decreases our resolution time by about an hour per alert.

Auvik has also helped us manage our IT team. We have multiple people in the department, so it's also nice that Auvik creates a record of who checks the network equipment. I can find out precisely who checked and cleared an alert or who might have tunneled into a piece of equipment to make changes. The audit trail benefits us greatly.

We get alerts about any issue that's happening in the infrastructure. We're able to take those alerts. If it's a low-severity issue that can be fixed over time, we can assign it to a lower-level engineer. The critical alerts go to higher-tier engineers who can respond accordingly. The Auvik platform makes it very easy. Some alerts come in by default. Many of them are already pretty well-tuned to detect what's critical and what is just informational. We've built on their current alert system with a few modifications, but those alert systems allow us to prioritize who resolves the alerts. I don't think the device inventories save us time, but it's nice to see our count. 

The ability to map out the network topology is one of the top features I like about Auvik. It's one of the best on the market. They have a feature called Loopback Detection, which has helped us, in many scenarios easily detect that without having to physically go to the location to see if there is a loopback somewhere. 

The monitoring and management features are easy to use, and the documentation Auvik provides is clear and easy to understand. We set up a collector, and it's on its way. We have never had any trouble. It's great because even my junior engineers can set it up without a problem. Auvik offers a single integrated platform for managing our devices and infrastructure in one place. It isn't essential, but it's nice to have.

Although the network topology is excellent, it has a hard time picking up some devices on the network. A device might not be fully supported, or Auvik is unable to pull all the information from it. 

The only other problem is the SNMP logging credentials. Sometimes, when I input these credentials, logging into the devices takes a decent amount of time to see if the credentials work. It would be fantastic if they could improve that.

I have been using Auvik for about three years.

Auvik is highly stable, and they communicate well about the maintenance windows. I don't think I've ever had Auvik go down in the middle of the day. It's very reliable.

Auvik is extremely scalable. They have options for scaling to multiple sites. I don't know if there's even a theoretical limit to its scalability.

I rate Auvik's support a ten out of ten. They're super knowledgeable. They typically have an answer for any question I throw at them.

Positive

Setting up Auvik is very straightforward. We started with a trial, and from there, we could follow the guides to get everything set up. Our initial trial deployment was out-of-the-box, but once we purchased it, we reached out to Auvik to get it perfected. 

Our deployment team consisted of me and one other person, so there were two people to deploy to every site. It was quick once everything was set up the way we wanted. It was a staged deployment, so it took longer than usual. If I were to do it right now, it probably wouldn't take longer than an eight-hour day.

We deployed it ourselves with vendor support. We got everything set up and configured the way we wanted in an hour or so.

I don't know if time-to-value is necessarily a metric I would consider because it's mostly internal, but from a productivity standpoint, we can respond to IT issues faster. I don't see it in my organization, but I can totally see how companies that support multiple clients could see a time to value.

I believe that Auvik is one of the most expensive tools, but it is also the best.

We tested various solutions, but Auvik was our first choice. However, I wouldn't say we tried other solutions in the same depth as we used Auvik. It was three years ago, so I'm having difficulty remembering names. There was another solution that was part of the ticketing system we use. We tried that because it was built in, but it was subpar compared to Auvik.

I rate Auvik a ten out of ten. If you plan to implement Auvik, you should deploy it in a testing environment to ensure it's running perfectly and customize the alerts that you want to get. With the out-of-the-box configuration, you will be getting alerts that you might not necessarily care about. If you take the time to go through those alerts and set everything up, it will probably make your life much easier.

We are a small company of about 15 people. We do open-source kernel development for lab machines. We have about 100 of these machines and they are all connected using smart routers. However, it is hard to monitor the routers' states.

We do open-source driver development as a contractor for other companies that may have licensing issues. We write the open-source network drivers for Linux and other open-source operating systems. That is the reason we need good network monitoring software: so that we know where there are problems in our network drivers. If the network drivers produce very bad network traffic, we need to know the first time. We have a lot of test devices, laptops, running in our lab, and they are currently monitored by Auvik, and we are very satisfied.

Before we got Auvik, we had to write scripts to get every device's state, to see the upload speed and download speeds, and whether there was any abnormal download or upload bandwidth. Because we develop network drivers, these are very important metrics for us, so that we know if there is any bad traffic in our network. Previously, we had to update our scripts every time there was an update to our routers' firmware. And if we had to update our requirements, we needed to rewrite the scripts and redeploy them on all of our routers. That required a lot of manual work. Auvik helped us eliminate that work.

Previously, when we managed the system, we needed to write our own script to run a single command on all the routers. Now, we can do that on the console. We can select everything and run a single command for all the devices with a single click.

A lot of tasks used to be repetitive work, like for new-device support. One of the really great points about Auvik is that it helps to reduce all that toil, including debugging scripts and maintaining them for the latest version.

The most important thing is that you can control everything, every device, all at once. As a unified platform, it handles all kinds of devices and all kinds of brands. If we decided to buy a new brand of router, we wouldn't need to check the manual and write new configuration scripts or record configuration macros ourselves. Auvik handles everything for us.

Before Auvik, we used multiple applications for managing things. Every week, we save hours. Previously, we spent a lot of time watching dashboards to see what went wrong. When a bug would occur, we would need to dump all the logs and look at everything. Now, we can usually diagnose everything within 30 minutes to an hour. It is saving three to four software-engineer-hours per week. That is a lot.

Auvik saves time and effort for our IT team. We can automate more things with the help of Auvik. It makes our team more available, always. It not only helps with availability of the software engineers on the IT team but with the availability of all our IT people. It has eliminated a lot of low-level tasks. And sometimes, it could be reducing work for senior engineers. Some of our issues can be hard to resolve, especially when dealing with the in-lab hardware. It can be hairy. Those weekly hours can be better used for the introduction of new devices or maintaining the high availability of our devices better. We can focus on expanding our labs a lot. It makes us more scalable, overall.

One of the most valuable features is the remote monitoring. It monitors the egress and ingress bandwidth and you can add custom rules to monitor if something is wrong. You can also add your own metrics if needed.

Auvik provides us with a unified management console. It is a website that displays all your routers, network switches, and devices connected to that router. You can easily see everything in that single dashboard.

You can use rule-based or simple, program-based monitoring to see if there is any abnormal traffic. 

It has good support for our devices, including our routers and Ethernet switches that come from the major brands. We are using Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, and Auvik has very good support for them. And it has pretty good support for other major brands like Netgear and TP-Link, as well. One of the reasons we choose Auvik is because the devices we currently use overlap with its list of supported devices.

Overall, the monitoring and management functions of Auvik are easy to use, but at times they seem oversimplified. Sometimes, we need more complicated scripting. Only using the basic logical rules like AND or OR or NOT is not enough. It can make the rules too complicated.

Also, when you load the Auvik website, it shows the topology. From my experience, it is mostly accurate. When we configured our network, there were some mismatches between the automatically-detected network topology and the actual topology. Some of the devices were not detected or were not supported by Auvik. We were able to manually modify things and everything has worked well since then.

Another issue is that to use Auvik you have to have a dedicated machine, either a virtual or Windows machine. Auvik continuously listens to the devices to look for all the devices on the network. This is a problem because it is a single point of failure. If that machine fails, all the functionality of Auvik stops. We can have redundant nodes, but it is still a problem.

Another problem is that it only works on Intel processors. Some of our machines do not use Intel processors. This was a problem initially because we had to get a new machine that runs the Auvik service. I would like to see it support more platforms and operating systems.

We started the 14-day trial plan this summer, and then we decided to purchase a license. So we have been fully using it for four or five months.

So far, the uptime has been really ideal.

Performance-wise, it's also good. For our use cases the monitoring machine is just a server, but it is not that powerful. It uses a lot of networking I/O, but it hasn't caused any network congestion.

It is scalable.

We have not been in touch with their technical support that often, but on occasion. Most of the team is in Toronto or the Eastern Time Zone and we are located in the Pacific Time Zone. But they are pretty responsive and their technical support team is pretty professional and reliable.

Positive

We didn't use any solution other than our own scripts to maintain the network.

As the head of IT, I led the work of deploying Auvik. It is straightforward because you use a new machine to run Auvik. It still needs to be part of the same VLAN as the other devices, but we didn't see any real glitches.

Our deployment is just a single location and we only use it for our lab devices. The lab has multiple layers of switches, Layer 3 switches, and routers, and all the test devices are managed over SNMP and Intel vPro.

After the collector was implemented, the network mapping went pretty fast. After it started running, it populated almost immediately, within minutes. But to get it fully propagated and have every device fully scanned took a while. That was expected.

We did our test of Auvik in a physically isolated, small testing network during the trial period. When we actually deployed it in our prod environment, it went pretty smoothly. We followed the playbook and it worked well.

The time that Auvik takes to search all the devices and get everything propagated is average or slightly above average. If there is a device update, for example, and a router reboots, it could take a while for it to be rediscovered by Auvik. I think that is because the frequency with which Auvik checks devices is pretty limited. If it worked otherwise, it would make the whole network congested. So the speed of checking devices is throttled and that means it could take minutes to get the latest state of devices. But once everything is online, you get real-time information.

We haven't had to do any maintenance on Auvik itself.

We did it ourselves and we didn't run into any issues. We had two software engineers involved.

We have only used it for a few months, but in the future we are going to expand our testing-devices fleet. We are going to double our number of testing devices. For most of the tests, the waiting time will be cut in half. Developers will spend less time waiting for tests to finish running everything and spend more time on actual development.

It is on a monthly subscription plan and it's charged by the device. We decided to use it for a year, first, to see how good it is.

PRTG Network Monitor and LogicMonitor were quite a bit more expensive compared to our current solution. Some of the other solutions we looked at are one-time purchases, but they are longer-term investments. For our projects, Auvik is more elastic. Per router, per month, it is a fixed price. We negotiated and got a more competitive price.

We did shop around for other network monitors to see what the best option was before we decided to buy Auvik. We tried PRTG Network Monitor and we tried LogicMonitor, but both are pretty focused on automatic network monitoring using protocols that are common to all devices, like SNMP. 

Auvik attracted us because of two things. One was that it is easy to configure. You don't need to set up your own web server or something like that. There is a trade-off there. If you do everything yourself, you own all the data within your network. However, that scenario is more vulnerable to external threats. But if you give all the network topology to websites like Auvik, there could be some privacy or security concerns. We did an evaluation and it seemed that Auvik would be a reliable partner for us.

The second thing that attracted us was Auvik's pricing, which is pretty competitive.

In terms of deployment, Auvik is a mixed model. You don't need to buy a dedicated machine from Auvik, but you need something that can run the Auvik monitor, whether it is a Docker instance or just a physical machine. We chose to use a physical machine mostly for security. That gives us better physical isolation from the rest of our network and makes it easier to manage and monitor if an attack were to occur.

As a very small company with a limited IT team, we found that Auvik is really helpful when you don't have a large IT team to do a lot of things. A lot of tasks can be done by Auvik and it will really help automate things.

The overall intuitiveness of the network visualization provided by Auvik is an eight or nine out of 10. There are some glitches, but it is easy to handle.

On the whole, it is a good solution. There are some issues, but I'm really satisfied.